Simplified food webs lead to energetic bottlenecks in polluted lakes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Very little is known about the consequence of human activities on the flow of energy through natural ecosystems. Here, we present a trophic-based approach to describing energy relationships in pollutant-disturbed lakes, emphasizing the importance of prey diversity in maintaining energy transfer to growing fish. Both diet and community analysis indicated that the food web leading to yellow perch (Perca flavescens) in metal-polluted lakes was extremely simplified compared with reference lakes. Through the application of an in situ marker for fish activity costs (muscle lactate dehydrogenase activity) and through bioenergetic modelling, we show how this has severe consequences on the efficiency of energy transfer to perch from their prey; premature energetic bottlenecks (zero conversion efficiency) occur when successively larger prey types are not available to growing perch. These observations provide a much needed ecological and physiological framework for assessing how energy transfer can be affected in polluted systems. Our approach need not be limited therein but should be applicable to any aquatic system where food web structure is variable and (or) disrupted.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".